Hello! This week we are studying the Turkish population in Berlin. Turks make up a huge portion of the immigrant population here, as they were invited as "guest workers" in the 1960's to help with the "economic wonder." Many stayed, and brought their families ... and now there is a whole new generation of Turkish-German people living, mostly in big cities, throughout Germany. Thus Germany is dealing with the requisite immigration-law and social issues that come with having a large influx of foreigners. Welcome to the Western World! Here is Martha, who led us on a fabulous walking tour of Kreuzberg, where a large part of the Turkish population lives in Berlin, and she bought us all baklava - the best I've ever tasted.

Mmmmmmmm.

Martha's tour also included a trip to the Turkish market! There was a ton of really yummy-looking food (we had turkish delight), plus a million yards of cloth, sewing supplies, kids' clothes, scarves, pajamas, shoes, toys ... and a very obviously Turkish crowd!

And finally ... here is our "war room" picture - a little treat we're giving our classmates in our handout for our walking tour on Friday! Our roommate Jason took it (he's got quite the eye), and you can see our co-tour-leader Regan on the left. It's going to be quite a tour!

Hello! We've been doing a lot of U-Bahn riding lately, getting ready for our "walking tour" (which is really going to be more of a riding tour) on Friday. Here is Chance on the escalator from the U5. There are so many trains criss-crossing at big stations like here at Alexanderplatz, that they are all at different depths! This one is a few flights down ... luckily there's an escalator for us lazy people.

Happy Thanksgiving! I don't know why, but somehow a few of us thought it would be a great idea to build a huge blanket fort in our apartment, the night before we were having 20 people over for Thanksgiving. This is what the house looked like on Thanksgiving morning, right about the time we were supposed to be putting the turkey in ... we were a good team, though, and got it all cleaned up in time.

Chance proved his cooking mettle by doing the turkey - he basted with butter and checked it lovingly all morning! (There had been a bit of a fiasco the day before, as we went to buy the turkey at the fancy, American-product-carrying department store supermarket, and then realized it was frozen and would have to be taken home to be thawed ... and meanwhile, we were late for our walking tour of Stalinallee!) Here is Chance, peppering the gravy (thanks for the recipe help, moms!).

Everyone made their specialties from home (or, in a few cases, from recipes off the internet) - homemade stuffing, yams, gravy, brussel sprouts, waldorf salad, green bean casserole, garlic mashed potatoes, potatoes au gratin, layered salad ... it was quite a feast!

We ended the night with a rollicking game of Jenga! It was a lovely Thanksgiving, even though we miss home and familiar faces. Hope yours was warm and wonderful!

Hello! I'm sure you all are having fun baking turkeys (turkies?) and mashing potatoes for tomorrow! We actually bought a turkey, too, and hopefully we'll manage to cook it successfully. :) Meanwhile, I thought you all might be interested in seeing the inside of our school - here is the hall leading to our classroom.

Here is Chance at an S-bahn stop, with his new favorite reading material - the Berliner Tagesspiegel (Daily Mirror).

The mascot of Berlin is a bear - maybe you've seen it on flags or pins ... and they have three real official bears here too! They live in this little habitat behind one of the city museums. I didn't think it looked big enough for three bears - and if Goldilocks shows up, they'll definitely have a problem.

From the top you could see the TV Tower and the Berliner Dom --

There was a gorgeous view ...

No, Chance isn't sad; that's just his camera face. :)

Last night we ended up at a Christmas near the center of the city. This one was a lot less like a carnival, and more like an arts & crafts fair. We had fun walking around and looking at all the handmade items, and munching on roasted chestnuts!

One of the really cool things about German Christmas markets is that artisans don't just sit in booths and peddle their wares - they bring their tools with them and make things! This guy was hammering a steel nail.

Today we took a short walking tour of what was formerly called "Stalinallee," but was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee after Stalin's death. It was built to be the showpiece of East Germany, with apartments given to prominent people or lucky workers. It's almost impossible to photograph the street, because it's so incredibly massive - a large, broad street and walking area, plus huge buildings flanking each side.

These towers flank the street at one end. I thought the lines in this picture were really interesting!

Here is Katherine, who has been teaching the optional language component of our class. Unfortunately, since we're all so busy with projects, homework, and recovering from walking tours, nobody has been showing up to the classes! This week she even had something really fun planned - baking Stollen, a German specialty pastry that is especially great around Christmastime. Since the "class" is at our apartment, I was the one "student" who ended up baking, in German! It was fun, and, as you can see, doughy.

Hello all! Here I am, sitting at the computer, typing to you. It's a little self-portrait, since I barely ever let the camera get into Chance's hands. :)

Tonight we did - yep, you guessed it - a walking tour, led by our cohorts Brad (on the left) and Jason (with the umbrella)! They are two of our favorite people on this trip.

See everyone bundled up like the Michelin man? Yeah, it's cold. Here's Jason telling us about the events of the night of October 7th, 1989, on which a group of a couple thousand protestors marched through Berlin, demanding governmental reforms and more freedom (which did not, incidentally, mean they wanted to reunite with the West). We followed their path on this walking tour.

In the middle of our tour, by pure coincidence, we ended up in a maze of a Christmas carnival! There were endless lights, rides, and sugary things to eat. It could've been deadly, but we pulled through and even made it past the cheesy Christmas dancers to the other side.

They had a giant one of those things that my grandmother used to have at Christmas ... only this one didn't have real candles.

There's Jason, holding the umbrella so we can follow him easily (it's pretty confusing with all those lights and rides everywhere, not to mention the signs for 1/2-meter-long sausages!) In the background you can see the Berliner Dom.

The end of the tour was at the Gethsemane Church, where about a thousand people were gathered at the end of the night's protest. It has this really great statue in front ... people actually still meet here every Monday night to pray for peace, 15 years after that first Monday.

On Saturday Chance, our classmate Regan, and I rehearsed for our "walking tour." Everyone in the class is required to give one, and since the three of us are doing projects on similar things, we banded together. Part of our tour is going to be on a double-decker public bus! I had never been on one before - it was very exciting. Here is the view from the top, which, I must say, feels very tippy!!

You can't really see it in the picture (I was a little too slow on the draw), but in the back of this police van, the policemen were playing UNO! Yes, that's right. UNO. They obviously have very busy lives. There is a great story about the new finance minister on his first day in Berlin, having an auto accident at the "Big Star" - a huge traffic circle similar to the one around Arc de Triumph in Paris. He tried to get two policemen to help him - but they were crouched in their van eating sausages and said they were "unavailable." Crazy!

This isn't going to be a stop on our tour, but because it was rain/snowing and we had taken several "unplanned detours" (we weren't lost! we just missed the stops!) already, we decided to warm up in the very shi-shi Einstein Cafe. It's sort of like a fancy Starbucks or Nordstrom Cafe ... in the heart of the new, chic shopping area - not much personality to it, but they had good coffee.

The high point of our rehearsal was "finding the pen" (belonging to Chance, which Regan had in his pocket the whole time, but for which he walked back half a block to see if he dropped it) ... here is the Moment of Handoff! Our tour is going to be more exciting than this, we hope. But perhaps Finding the Pen is enough to make any walking tour a thing to remember. We'll see.

This morning we woke up to the first tiny powdering of snow outside! (It's that white stuff in the middle of the picture.) This is the view out our kitchen window. We braved the cold wind and went over to the Jewish Museum today. It's very famous, designed by the prominent architect Daniel Libeskind.

The "Garden of Exile" is a symbolic space on one side of the musuem... It has 49 concrete blocks with trees planted in them - 48 with soil from Berlin, and one with soil from Israel.

This is a semi-permanent art installation called "Fallen Leaves." Those are iron cutouts of faces covering the floor, and visitors are encouraged to walk on them. It was a really moving piece.

I'm not sure it's clear in this picture, but at 3:30 when we left the museum, it was already dusk. And still a month to go until Winter Solstice! Berlin is a lot farther north than Seattle.

Today was very windy and the trees all look like winter, with only little straggly leaves hanging on in the midst of the gale. We ran across this very lonely-looking bust of Felix Mendelssohn in what is called "Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Park," but which looks like an undeveloped tract of land - a common sight here. At least he has a nice view of the canal (flowing under the bridge in the background).

The other day my sister asked me if you could still see parts of the wall around Berlin. Not really. They are hard to find. But this little piece of sidewalk near Checkpoint Charlie at least says where it was.

The Christmas Frenzy is starting here ... a lot later than back home, and with some differences. I'm not exactly sure what this sign is about, since it says, "Today! Christmas Shopping Saturday until 8pm" but I think they mean they are extending their hours for those rabid holiday shoppers, instead of closing their doors at the usual 6pm.

Yesterday we took, yes, a walking tour (surprise) and happened to see the 'Rathaus' (a neighborhood town hall, basically more like a big DMV inside, but impressive outside) where JFK gave his famous "ich bin ein Berliner" speech. Yep, he stood right on that very balcony!

This is a potential stand-in for Joe Bar while we're here (though Joe Bar, of course, can never truly be replaced). It's called Bierhimmel and it serves lovely coffee and heavenly cakes!! It's a little bit far from our current apartment but will be within easy U-Bahn distance of our next one, in Kreuzberg. Chance is that little stick figure in the background!

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I thought everyone might like to see our faces (we certainly miss yours!) - here we are having fun on the tram. Our red cheeks are betraying the fact that the weather has been cut-through-your-clothes-cold and rainy. They keep talking about snow, but who knows ....

This week we talked about the destruction of WWII, as well as Nazi architecture and Hitler's plans for the city. Not the most uplifting subject, but important to Berlin nonetheless. There isn't much of the Nazi architecture left here, but this is one example - Goering's Aviation Ministry, which is now the Finance building. Hitler and his architect Albert Speer did almost as much to ruin the classic form of Berlin as the bombings did - they tore down quite a few blocks of buildings to make way for their monumental plans which, obviously, were never realized.

We finished up by taking a look at the former site of Hitler's Chancellory. His bunker was under there somehwere, and in the 80's East Germany built luxury apartments here for its more prominent citizens - the most well-known being Katerina Witt, the famous figure skater!

On Thursday we headed off on the train to Dresden, which is about 2 hours southeast of Berlin, near the Polish and Czech borders. It used to be called "Florence on the Elbe," and you can see why in this picture. It has a gorgeous skyline, running along the river. It was the capitol of Saxony, a kingdom which was very wealthy and part of the Holy Roman Empire until the late 1800's when it was incorporated along with all sorts of other independent states into what we now think of as Germany.
As most of you probably know, it is one of the most famous sites of firebombing, which here took place only days before the end of the war and killed over 35,000 people, as well as pretty much levelling the city. After that it became part of East Germany.

We got to spend lots of time with John, our professor, on this trip, which was really nice. He is not only very knowledgable about German history, but an extremely approachable and likable person. Here he and Chance are celebrating having found the envelope full of cash to pay for all our hotel rooms and tickets ... we thought it was lost, but it was in John's coat pocket. Phew!

We took a tour of the Semper Oper, which houses one of the most renowned opera companies in Germany (tickets are often booked a year in advance). Destroyed in 1945, it was rebuilt in the 80's according to the original, mid-1800's plans. We got a good look at the architecture, but unfortunately didn't get to hear any music. We're going to try to return over Thanksgiving and catch an opera.

Santa seems to be appearing more and more here ... Germans call him the "Weihnachtsmann" (Christmas Man). This poor Santa looked a little ... uncomfortable.

Here's an example of the Communist-era architecture that makes up a good part of Dresden now. After the war they rebuilt the older part of the city, which had been completely ruined by the fire, with their Eastern-style, modern buildings which we now consider ugly. Next you'll see what they're trying to do in other parts of the Old City --

Here's how Dresden used to look in the early 1900's (a model in the information building sponsored by the group who is supporting the rebuilding of Dresden) ...